Rubbish Tories

Cross-posted on the Corner:

If recycling is, as the saying goes, the liberal equivalent of prayer, what does this make the rubbish bins of Britain?

Over at the Daily Telegraph, Brendan O’Neill gives an update:

You would think the solution to the blighting of Britain’s residential streets with more and more household bins was pretty straightforward – stop forcing people to sort their rubbish into myriad different bins in the name of “saving the planet”. Instead, let them cram all their waste into one bin, like we did for decades, before some bloke in a donkey jacket and flat cap turns up to whisk it all away, no questions asked. Right? Apparently not. Eric Pickles’ [he’s the Conservative Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government] preferred solution to the “bin blight” is to institute new planning guidance that will force developers to create a special bin-storage bit to all the new homes they build. In short, he plans to counter local councils’ petty meddling in people’s daily habits by launching some petty meddling of his own into the work of building firms. So much for Tory promises to shrink Big Government.

Pickles has a point when he says there is a “ghastly gauntlet” of bins and recycling boxes on Britain’s streets. “Ugly bin clutter” is ruining residential streets, he says, with “the proliferation of multiple bins [creating] a blot on the landscape”. Yet rather than address the source of this bin invasion – which is local authorities’ embracing of environmentalist dogma and their enforcing of the entirely pointless ritual of recycling on to households across the land – Pickles prefers to take the easier route of forcing developers to build shelters to accommodate all these unnecessary, annoying, eye-sore bins. This provides a keen insight into the New Conservatives’ political cowardice: don’t ask awkward questions of modern-day eco-pieties and instead create a whole new layer of infrastructure to negate their worst consequences.

At this point, I shall rudely interrupt Mr. O’Neill to note recent reports showing that Conservative Party membership figures are reaching new lows, down from some 250,000 when David Cameron (an example for the GOP, we were told at the time) became leader to below 100,000 today (perhaps as low as around seventy thousand: there are different ways to slice the data).

But back to O’Neill:

The bin situation is spiralling out of control. Gone are the days when you could unthinkingly chuck everything from a banana skin to a plastic bottle into one binbag and not have to worry about what would become of it all. Now, in some parts of Britain, people have up to seven different bins to separate their waste between. In the past you’d walk down a suburban street and admire the best-kept gardens or fanciest net curtains; now you finding yourself marvelling at how many differently hued bins are plonked outside every home and wondering how waste disposal and collection came to be such complicated endeavours.

Well, the cowardice of the Tory Party is one of the reasons for this mess, but it is a cowardice that is not confined to “eco-pieties” (many of which the Cameron Conservatives have, incidentally, actively embraced), but also in its dealings with the EU, often the key regulator in this area.

O’Neill:

Personal recycling is a complete waste of time too, in environmental, “planet-saving” terms, given that household waste is a pretty small proportion of overall waste in Britain. Enforced recycling of household tat is less a practical stab at rescuing Mother Earth from climate change and more a punishment of families for being wasteful, a ritual designed to remind us of our greed and overall dirtiness by making us muck through everything we chuck away.

Sounds like a religious ritual to me, maybe more of an act of penance than a prayer, but religious nonetheless.